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Engaged customers are always a valuable asset to any organization. They buy more products, bring more revenues, and help keep the wheels of the business flying high. So, the more you keep them engaged, the better it’d be for the health of your enterprise.
And when it comes to engaging customers, you can rely as much on the traditional methods as on the new-age routes. In fact, you can combine both approaches and tie them with technology to achieve a new dimension in engagement.
Maybe for that reason, a lot of businesses now look to leverage customer engagement technology to stay ahead of the race. Such technology can help you engage, interact and convert customers across stages of the sales cycle.
In this blog, we will have a detailed analysis of customer engagement using technology and the advantages of doing the same.
What is Customer Engagement Technology?
The role of customer engagement technology for any business is to enhance service or support and ensure value to users at each stage of the journey. Using technology is now a key aspect of engaging customers and performing a range of tasks that were once not possible manually.
Thanks to the advancements in technology, customer engagement is now simpler and easier than ever with tasks like automation and support getting a huge boost. From answering queries instantly to ensuring personalized service, everything in regard to engagement is now effortless with technology.
Benefits of Using Technology for Customer Engagement
Customer engagement was once a manual exercise. But back then, a business did not have to engage hundreds of customers simultaneously. And now when channels and touchpoints have grown so much, the need for technology is always felt in accommodating all customers together and ensuring value to them at each step of the way.
Benefits are many when your business decides to use digital customer engagement technology.
- Keeping pace with the new-age customers – Using technology is perhaps the only way to keep up with the changing landscape of engagement and ensure value to customers in exactly the way they would like.
- Boosting the rate of engagement – The rate of engagement goes notches up when a business uses technology as it’s then able to connect timely, be available at every touchpoint, and meet the expectations of customers.
- Ensuring great experience across touchpoints – Customers now have the option to choose from a range of channels and touchpoints to reach a business and only technology can enable an enterprise to ensure amazing experiences at each step of the way.
- Delivering individualized service – A business that uses technology for engagement finds tons of customer data from across stages. And it can always use analytics to meet specific needs at any stage of the journey.
How to Improve Customer Engagement Through Technology?
For customers, nothing matters more than getting an improved experience. This keeps them engaged with the brand forever and also brings them back more often. Keeping this in mind, many businesses now try to strike a balance between technology and customer engagement for more value to the bottom line.
There are many ways to use technology for boosting engagement with customers –
1. Artificial Intelligence
Quick and real-time responses are one of the key elements of engaging customers successfully. When the answers are instant, it not only saves time for customers but also reduces their frustration which is often a norm in dealing with the support team.
Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, handling customers becomes easier than ever before as the service team has the right tools for the same. In fact, businesses that know how ai technology will transform customer engagement will stay one step ahead of the rest in the support game.
With AI, there will be chatbots that can automate service delivery and it can always have a huge impact on the kind of experience customers will have with a business. Combining chatbots with human support can definitely elevate the level of engagement manifold.
Tips to use artificial intelligence technology to improve customer engagement
- Automate various tasks across the support to ensure prompt help for customers at each stage of the journey.
- Make sure AI is used where technology is needed and also remember to use it in combination with human resources to deliver the kind of engagement customers wish for.
2. Omnichannel Integration
Customers want the flexibility to choose their channel of choice when it comes to engaging with brands. They also want businesses to be available anywhere and anytime they wish. And all this is not possible for any organization that has yet to adopt multiple channels to its fold.
To engage customers on their terms, it’s important to cover all the touchpoints and stay available round the clock of them. This is where an omni-channel communication strategy helps it can keep you available everywhere by using the right tools.
And when there is omnichannel integration, customers can always get quick help no matter which platform or channel they choose be it website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. The best part, this type of integration works best whether for retail banking customer engagement technology or for any other industry.
How to use omnichannel integration for engagement?
- Your business can use visual engagement tools like co-browsing and video chat to enhance the level of engagement and reduce the number of touchpoints in a big way.
- Chatbots can be used to automate common queries while live chat can be leveraged to address all sales and support queries.
3. Personalization
Most customers are happy when they get a seamless, unique, and personalized experience throughout the journey. In fact, 8 out of ten consumers will make a purchase from a brand that provides them with personalized experiences.
However, to deliver this kind of experience you need to ensure your service approach is aligned with consumers’ preferences and needs. You will also need to use past data to ensure individualized treatment at each step of the way.
After all, unless you know the customers better, how can you engage with them at a personal level? So, you should start putting in the effort to know your customers well as only this can open the route to personalization.
Ways to deliver personalization to customers
- You should leverage website analytics to get a good understanding of user behavior and then take a data-driven approach to personalization.
- Carry out customer surveys routinely or conduct opinion polls to know what customers expect from your business.
4. Smart Routing
The real meaning of delivering frictionless customer support is to have the technology to route queries/issues to the right agents. Smart routing is always the key to laying the foundation of a successful customer experience.
In addition, when the routing is intelligent it makes internal customer support operations as efficient as needed. However, a business needs access to digital and voice customer-contact options to technology to route the queries to the right team.
Since smart routing is a critical customer engagement technology, you need to have to direct all incoming queries to the concerned department. Whether the queries come via phone, email, chat, messaging, or any other channel, having an adept routing system in place can definitely boost customer engagement.
5. Chatbots
Chatbots are vital to adding a new dimension to the customer engagement technology world. In fact, they have become an indispensable tool in the arsenal of support teams across industries purely for bringing cutting-edge value to engagement.
In fact, 35% of consumers are now of the opinion that companies should use chatbots to deliver a better experience. And the road to engaging customers starts with ensuring them a better experience with your brand.
You can use advanced conversational AI chatbots and drive engagement with the help of user data. Bots are intelligent and can make conversations interactive by delivering consistent answers.
Tips to enhance customer engagement using chatbots
- Chatbots are quite advanced these days and they can analyze responses based on customer details and history which can be used for boosting engagement.
- The use of a bot can be done to deliver fast, real-time and one-on-one responses and all this can add to the experiences of customers.
6. Customer Sentiment Analysis
Customers can spend 140% more after having a positive experience with your brand. So, whether they feel negative or positive about your brand can have a huge bearing on the success of your business.
It’s therefore equally important to have a proper system and technology in place to gauge customer sentiment and become aware of the varied emotions that your customers go through.
Customer sentiment analysis is key to knowing the different emotions customers have while exploring your products and services. This kind of metric can fetch deep insights into customers’ sentiments.
This is how you can boost customer loyalty, and lifetime value and then maximize their stay with your brand.
How to analyze customer sentiment?
- While a business should collect customer responses on as many touchpoints as possible, it’s equally important to collect their feedback at the end of every live chat session for more clarity on their emotions.
- A business can collect and gauge sentiment by using social media Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and then improve their effort at engagement.
7. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
More people are using smart speakers to improve their customer service interactions. In fact, the quantum of interactions with technology is projected to rise up with most of them happening through “conversations” with smart machines.
All this has been made possible due to the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is a technology with the ability to understand words, and sentences as well as the context of queries.
NLP can interpret and analyze verbal statements and when used with a chatbot ensures answers without human intervention.
Your business can always add it as a part of customer engagement hub technology and ensure an advanced voice search facility for customers.
8. Real-Time Support
When it comes to customer engagement, technology is as important as human involvement. Although there are AI-powered chatbots and voice search, there will always be instances where human intervention becomes important.
Similarly, no matter how advanced chatbots are, or whether they use NLP or ML technologies, they can still fall short in terms of customer engagement. They are indeed good at mimicking a human response for answering questions, you just can’t rely on them for all complicated matters.
So, for a business, it’s always important to have multiple points of contact for consumers so that communication is quick and effortless. After all, not all queries can be solved with machines; customers too want to talk to a human agent in certain cases.
This is where live chat-enabled real-time support can come in handy. You can use it not only as a great retail customer engagement technology but can also for any other industry as well.
Benefits of real-time support
- Your support team can make available information to customers in real-time and instantly which can elevate their experience with the brand
- Live chat support is great for situations where agents’ expertise is needed more than the capabilities of technology for solving problems and ensuring personalization.
Use REVE’s Engagement Technology Platform and Add Value to Customers
Customer engagement should always be a top priority for businesses. The focus has to be on using the right mix of technology and tools to engage users better and serve them well across stages of the journey.
We, at REVE, are aware of the challenges that brands face on front of engaging customers. To such problems, our engagement tools can prove a great asset and also become an ally for enterprises of all sizes.
In fact, our AI chatbot has all the advanced features needed to help customers at each stage of the journey.
The bot can automate common queries and ensure minimum reliance on human resources for engaging with customers.
Other key multilingual customer engagement technology and tools include live chat, co-browsing software, and video chat and all these can be a great addition to the customer support armory of businesses.
Prepare Your Business for Customer Engagement Challenges with REVE Technology
Your business needs to keep pace with the changing landscape of customer engagement and have the best-in-class tools for support.
With REVE, your business can find a wide range of tools that can ensure a new dimension in engagement and also achieve happy customers.
Your business can start a free trial of some of the best engagement tools and take the right step forward toward winning customers.
